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It was another cold, cloudy evening.
Sea Fairy sighed. A hundred stories of frozen water, a hand that could nearly touch the stars above… but on nights like these, where the cover of deep grey clouds passed above her, the love of her life still felt so far from her reach. Sometimes, she screamed, and ached, storms raging beneath her, harsh thunder finding its way to raw emotion. Sometimes, she cried, and the waves were heavy beneath her tower.
But tonight, she only watched, with her sword clutched close to her chest. The metal was cold under the evening air.
The gloomy evening quickly turned to rain, and perhaps she should have expected it. The dark cover of clouds often preceded such a thing, and her dough was too sturdy to be softened by it—only her heart, hidden beneath, as she missed her more. The rainstorms were always short, but each drop of rain was its own span of time; a reminder of another moment spent, and infinite moments still to come. Hundreds, thousands, millions of seconds. A drop falling into her eyes, each blink hiding her gaze from the moon above. She waited, mesmerized as she had been the day she first saw her face.
Those seconds would always turn to minutes. A lunar eclipse, a nymph waiting with bated breath as the minutes ticked by, hoping for her muse to peek from behind Earthbread’s shadow. Hours of the days that passed her by, where the reflection of the moon was hidden behind pale blue skies. Years spent singing into the open air. A decades-long prayer for the ocean to lift her just a bit higher, to float above the clouds and let the stars take hold of her outstretched arms—and those centuries, fading into millennia. Generations of cookies passing her by, baked small and fragile and full of life; then, as it always does, freshness fades and then they’re gone. Lovers spend their lives together, a mere blink of an eye in her eternity.
Why, then—why, did every candied cloud floating across her vision feel like it was another life without her? Why did every drop of rain feel like it spanned eons?
Tonight, the rain was heavier than usual. There was no sound of thunder or flashes of lightning in her peripheral vision, though; only the waves crashing beneath and a nymph framed in silhouette at the top of her tower.
When the clouds parted, just barely, for the moonlight to shine on Sea Fairy once again—and she saw her love once more, the moon’s image reflected in each drop of rain—she felt all of the love that had been hidden from view a thousand times over.
It might have been her spirit or it might have just been fate, but it was at about that moment that Sea Fairy felt like she was floating above the top of those hundred floors. The water baked into her that cascaded around her rushed quickly in the rain, pooling not just around her feet but beneath them. The waves at the base of the tower were tall but not violent, meeting the floors gracefully and falling back.
Sometimes, in her imagination, the moon looked closer than ever. Tonight, she was certain she was right. She could see her so clearly now: Moonlight Cookie, lying in repose atop the moon, a hand on her cheek as she gazed back. Her gown draped over the moon rock, and if Sea Fairy could rise only two or three more floors above, she swore that she could reach up and touch its gossamer fabric.
The waves swept up her tower, and she rose with them. Her resolve was more firm than ever; that ice, that eternity worth of waiting and yearning and gazing above, held steady, too. Sea Fairy let her ocean carry her above the clouds and into the evening’s glow. The sound of rushing water should have filled her ears, but it faded into the background, no more intrusive than dew falling off a leaf. The sight of Moonlight, silken gown and flowing hair, lying atop the crescent that carried her closer and closer, hypnotized her. She was even more beautiful up close. Part of her wanted to stand there, in awed silence, half-convinced all of this was a dream. If she hadn’t heard Moonlight’s voice call out to her, she might well have.
“It’s you.” Moonlight held out a hand, reaching towards her—for her. She was almost close enough to touch. “You’re the one who’s been singing to me.”
Sea Fairy reached hers out, too, without a second thought. Their fingertips touched. Warmth erupted through her, flowing up her arm and finding its way to the water beneath, as if she had held her hands to a fireplace in the darkness of night. The world around her slowed with each careful moment, dough bent at the wrist, their palms meeting—the yellow glow of the moonlight reflecting on her pale hand. All of the light that the sky could hold felt like it was shining on her. She was still fixated on Moonlight’s gentle eyes, periwinkle and indigo and impossibly-bright white and so much more beautiful up close. Finally, finally, they were looking right back into hers.
“I am,” she said.
“I loved those cloudless nights,” Moonlight mused. “You have a beautiful voice. It’s so peaceful… I’m sure all of the ocean’s creatures loved listening to it as much as I do.”
Sea Fairy felt her face flush rosy pink—and by the time she noticed she had glanced away, flustered, she had already lost her gaze. A thing like that might have once filled her heart with sorrow, but Moonlight was right before her. Her body was surrounded by her warmth, wrapped in the shimmering of the starlight woven beneath her dough.
“I don’t… know much about them. Not as much as they must know about me,” she admitted. “I’ve mostly thought of you.”
“Is that so?” Moonlight asked, like she already knew the answer—like she already knew most things. “I’ve thought about you, too. I hoped that I could reach a day where I could meet you, one day. I always thought that your songs sounded like… like home, or something like it.”
“I always hoped you could hear me,” Sea Fairy said. Moonlight just smiled, and looked down to where their palms connected.
“Your hand, too—it’s cold. Colder than I expected,” she said, with a light chuckle. “So I suppose it’s good to know that I’m not dreaming.”
They’ve always been something like goddesses, but in that moment, Moonlight was almost like any other Cookie. Something about that little realization made Sea Fairy laugh, too.
“That would make both of us. You’re… warmer than I’d ever imagined.”
“It isn’t just me. It’s all of the stars. Can you feel them looking down on us?” Moonlight glanced up as she spoke, and her eyes held the familiarity of home as the night sky reflected in them. “They must have come into perfect alignment, for a moment like this.” A second later, and her gaze was back on Sea Fairy. “Isn’t it incredible?”
“I wish it didn’t have to be a moment,” Sea Fairy whispered.
Now that she’d had her by her side, she couldn’t imagine returning to her life without her. The thought of what she knew she needed to say next nearly made her breathless.
“Moonlight Cookie. Before the night ends—I’d like to stay. Please,” she said. “I don’t want to spend my life at the whims of the tides. I only want to be with you.”
It was a love confession she never had to make. Moonlight’s gaze softened, like she must have known all along.
Her world shifts. For as long as she’s spent waiting, somehow, this moment is what feels like eternity. Has she finally written her own destiny? Or was her fate always to defy it, even as her longing threatened to freeze her where she stood?
Still, Moonlight hesitates—
“Stay… here? In the stars?”
—and Sea Fairy couldn’t have dreamed of a world where she blamed her. There may be infinite answers in the City of Wizards, but she knows well that she’s doing something unprecedented. A celestial, abandoning her fate and leaving the ocean behind…
But she isn’t, is she? Those Cookies, who had made her remember warmth… they had shown her something greater. She hadn’t known it then, but she does now. To chase her dream—to leave with Moonlight, and face whatever comes next together—that had been her true fate. She had always been chasing what was meant to be, even if she hadn’t known it yet.
So Sea Fairy nods wordlessly. In all of the time that had gone by, she hopes she’s already said enough.
“I hardly know what to say,” Moonlight admits. “The ocean—you still hold so much power over it. Is that… is leaving... something you could do? Is it something we could do?”
“I can’t say,” Sea Fairy says. All she knows is that she would regret it more if she never did. “But I hope—I hope it’s something we’ve always known how to do. Whatever it looks like. That’s what I want.”
The tides had followed the light of the moon far longer than Sea Fairy had. Even in days she could no longer remember, that was something she had known to be true. It was their dance, their ebb and flow. Perhaps once upon a time, missing her had made the sea more whole—but now, as Sea Fairy Cookie, she can’t imagine a fate that isn’t completing her.
“I… I want that too.” Her grip on Sea Fairy’s hand tightens, just a little. It’s so slight that, if Sea Fairy weren’t so attuned to every bit of how their bodies converged into one, she could have missed it.
That’s all right. These things take time. They have eternity.
And Moonlight speaks again, an exploration through her uncharted waters. “I know so many things, that the Wizards left behind. But this is—strange, and new,” she says. Another slight movement, another moment of closeness. It all feels like a new beginning. “—and I don’t know any of it. I might… I might like to know it.”
“I’d like to know you.” Sea Fairy inches forward, with the same stalwart determination that had made her heart feel warm again so long ago—and, mirrored, the terror of some unimaginable loneliness. “I feel like I’ve missed out on so much. Oh, just look at me… all of this time has passed, and I’m not even sure of what to say.”
“That’s all right,” Moonlight says. Her free hand moves up, hesitantly, to touch Sea Fairy’s cheek. “If this is what you want—really what you want—then I’m here. I’ll wait as long as you need.”
Sea Fairy doesn’t even hesitate. “Of course it is,” she breathes. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear.”
Their hands interlock, fully this time. Moonlight pulls her close. Clear water flows over the fabric of her gown. The wave that had held Sea Fairy up dissipates beneath her feet, and her world is full, once again, of the depths of the sky in Moonlight’s eyes and the radiant heat in her arms.
She knows that she could say a few things. She considers telling Moonlight about the time she spent yearning for her. She thinks of telling her that it must have been fate, for the stars and the tides to align the way they did after all of those endless days of their existence. She almost tells her everything she wants to do next—but the truth is, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
“I love you,” she says instead.
Moonlight smiles. Whatever they have, it’s enough.
“I love you, too.”
So Sea Fairy steps forward, away from her tower, into the night.